[helliepig]

I've kind of made a pact with myself this year not to avoid the underlying stuff, knowing "feeling your feelings" is the way to healing.

 But that's not so easy really, A lot of it is incomprehensible and frightening and drives me with such weird beliefs that I am controlled by, even whilst I know they are illogical. It's very hard to explain, being preverbal.

So clear to me, the beliefs and what they mean, so familiar and strong yet there are no words to describe the contents or concepts. They relate to reality itself and are very very frightening.

At the moment I'm struggling to afford more therapy and in any case, feeling like I need to poke around in here and see if I can find out what's in here, otherwise I try to explain this stuff in ways that are hopelessly inadequate, and sit once more while people - even my therapist - just don't understand. It drives me crazy and makes those very little parts of me really panic. Easier to face them alone.

It is frightening, the sheer isolation of those existential thoughts. They've never been understood. I kind of know my only hope is to keep listening, keep feeling, stop this terrified running away from them and their confusing, contradictory surreal nature .
Then maybe I can do something with them.
I wish I could put it into words

There's something about a hopelessness because I'm not real somehow. Or that no one around me is real, maybe that's it. That connection is illusory.

There's some terrible fear of just existing and being real because that means death somehow.

I've built my life on chasing improvement, attainment, being the best, being good enough, trying to connect and yet it all feels like a wasteland- so many lonely painful memories. So much that could have been different - if only. Underneath, now I've stopped, is just a barren wasteland.

Underneath is a frightening brokenness and despair.

I am tired of feeling fizzy scared weird things instead of ordinary emotions and ordinary worries.

I can't conceive at the moment of what it must be like NOT to have this fizzy weird surreal stuff, the limits, the fears. That frightens me, how little I understand about how to live and how other people just do life. That they can't understand how frightening this stuff can be. That aloneness is terrifying

I believe I am worthless really underneath. I cannot believe anyone really cares and then  equally strongly I panic because on the other hand I don't see anyone to care for, not out there. They are all seem scary or disappointing or vapid or weird.

Or I'm scared of anyone coming close because it reminds me of something awful that I can't bear.

 Sometimes I think it's because if they are ordinary they not rescue and swaddle me in love and safety and I have to keep functioning in this dreary life without hope. That the rescue fantasy (logically I know is rubbish) but emotionally it is shattering and beyond the ability of those frightened parts to understand.

They don't see anything for themselves as them. They don't see any point. They don't want anything. they just want to be held and sleep and not be conscious. I think they are very very young.

So I am caught between a rock and a hard place.

The fear is visceral and irrational but very powerful. It's as if the fabric of life is splitting and I'm left trapped in a nightmare.

I remember as a very little child thinking I didn't want to live but if life was this bad death must be worse.

I have spent a lifetime horrified by this stuff when it is triggered, totally dissociated and running like crazy. I have tried so long  to figure out all the impasses caused by these fears and beliefs and surprise surprise, never got anywhere with it.//. Now I know I cannot figure them out. I have to feel the stuff, think the unthinkable and try and remind myself it Is  old stuff. But the present feels so empty and so full of despair.

I know my mother hardly ever spoke or looked at me other than in sneering contempt or out of duty. Dress all her little girls alike and pretend to be a mother.
I know I was left alone as a tiny baby.
My family knew nothing of love or genuinely liking kids, let alone protecting and nurturing them.
Noone protected me from the paedophiles or the attacks from my own siblings.
no one even noticed. they just joined in and blamed me.

Sometimes I think my life is over because NOTHING seems like worth having anymore if you don't even feel real. It feels like I'm always on the outside looking in and run away the minute someone comes near. And that even includes myself.

[Rainagain]

Helliepig

I read your post and I feel for you.
You are in distress and It jumps off the screen.

I don't have anything useful to say really, I hope you can see that you are not worthless,

You. Are. Not. Worthless.

[Three Roses]

I sense in your writing the bleakness you describe, and it echoes my own. We are not worthless, but we feel like we are. We are real, and feel like we aren't.

I'm also promising myself to try each day to let the real come out of me, be expressed by me.

Our voices all together will make a difference.

[JamesG]

Hellipig, honey.

It's a whirl of emotions and hard to pin down and fight your way out but you CAN do this.

With the lack of a counsellor I can suggest you do a few things I did that really helped to stop that chaotic thinking and enable some clarity to creep in.

First, write lists. Write down the reality of the thing again and again. The reality is:

1. This was done to you You are not responsible for any of what happened and even if you later made mistakes because of the fallout, by default, they are not your fault either.

2. Anyone, ANYONE, who experienced the things you did would likely or not be where you are now. We are not all the same, but given the surprising patterns you see in people's stories in here, the obvious inferences are that our brains are doing what they are naturally programmed to do. In other words, there is no success and fail here, only cause and effect.

3. Unconditional love in families is a pile of @£$%^&. There is either love or there isn't and in its absence, we are entitled to go elsewhere for happiness. Crap families ruthlessly exploit guilt and duty whilst displaying neither themselves. It is perfectly acceptable for anyone you find to be abusive and damaging to your sense of well-being to be ejected via the airlock, aliens style. You will get crap for doing it, but you were going to get crap anyway. Do it.

4. What you are feeling is actually not the truth, it is the result of injury to the chemistry of your brain. Sustained stress and neglect alters the shape of the brain (not permanent) through the bias of your body towards stress hormones. See your brain like any other part of your body, it can be hurt. Your adrenal glands have swamped your system with cortisol and adrenalin until finally you were forced to go numb, disassociation, (which I can never spell) and suppress these emotions to take the pressure off your endocrine system. With long-term stress, this alters the brain structure in a bad way and alters how you think creating a loop. The hippocampus shrinks and the brain starts to lose the ability to normally regulate emotions. But it feels like reality and it hurts like *. But it is vital to understand that there are two distinct issues, the cause, and the effect. The effect has to be dealt with as objectively as possible with a bias towards the maximum amount of research you can bear. Knowledge is power.

5. It's your life. Easy to say of course, but it's pretty fundamental. No one has the right to take you over, get inside your head or exploit you, neglect you or trash you. No one. Anyone that has, or does any of those no longer has the right to be in your life at all. There is nothing selfish about taking control and demanding what you and all of us deserve,  a bit of basic normailty.

6. Avoid caffeine. Exercise. Keep drinking to a minimum and rest when your body says rest. Listen to what your body is telling you. Adrenal fatigue is a big part of all this, as is outside guilt and pressure making us wear ourselves out for no good reason. Body knows best. Stop before you are forced to.

7. You are not the only one. In here are many really good people who have had some really bad people in their lives, just as you have. None of it is right, none of it is fair, none of it can be made to make any sense whatsoever, though we all so wish it would. There will be no closure other than that which we make with ourselves. Only in movies do the big conclusions happen, the big bombshell where everyone collectively comes to their senses. Not in real life I'm afraid. In real life no one will say sorry, take responsibility and put their crimes right. And the more reprehensible the crime, the less likely the honesty. You were horribly negelcted by the people you most needed, and that is a very deep scar that you crave to be treated, but sadly, all of us in here would stand more chance of an honest conversation with a great white shark than our abusers. The bottom line is that anyone capable of such a lack of empathy in the first place, will never gain it in later life unless they are sitting in front of a parole board and think it could help their case.

8. There is a better world. Truly. There are good people out there, and happiness is to be had, but first we have to put the fires out and see our stories from the high ground which we have gained when we were not even seeking it. Put yourself first, break your story down into its components and begin putting it into context. Family, relationships, illness, money, health etc etc.

so...

1. Not your fault
2. Your current issues are perfectly understandable
3. Your family is not a prison you have to live in
4. CPTSD is a physiological response to emotional pressures and needs to be seen as a physical injury.
5. It IS YOUR LIFE. You have a right, and obligation even, to live it.
6. Listnen to your body and avoid placing strains on it with caffeine etc. (take vitamin D btw.. max strength)
7. You are not alone and unique in your suffering. Everyone in here gets it even if the wider world can be about as sensitive as intestinal worms.
8. The world is not so full of monsters. There is beauty, kindness and love. But first we have to wash the mud and blood off and put on out best clothes and be able to see it before we can embrace it.

I suggest you write out your own version of the above and then write it again, and again until it sinks into those neural pathways in place of all that bad influence. Will be ok sweetheart, truly. x

[helliepig]

Thank you James. For that sheer effort of compassion and wisdom.

See, in a movie, someone would take the time and trouble to sit down and write that! (lol)

All heard and understand. I do get all that, I really do. It's just hard. It's like you said in one of your own posts, its hard to figure your own damaged brain out using your own damaged brain.
It's hard to work out what is pain and abnormal when it's all you've known. It's hard to understand love and security when you've not known it as a little one

That's the frustrating thing, all the reprogramming of positive experiences I try and achieve just gets blown away by the bombs of the past.

I probably will go and see my therapist at some point in the not too distant future. But this stuff I'm trying to deal with is odd and I'm not sure I can take it all there - can't somehow get it there!, They  are fleeting moments of almost experiences or atmospheres- not memories, not body sensations, not emotions.  Nonsensical, incomprehensible but very powerful and create a huge visceral reaction. I can't take them to therapy because they aren't something I can hold onto, visualise, remember. They are there, and then they aren't. A twisted mass of just...stuff.

I suspect they are dissociated fragments. I've had similar before when I was in pain but I could not tell you where the pain was or even IF it was. A painful ethereal non pain. So weird

So I'm tackling them myself using techniques I've done a 100 time with my therapist, cautiously, a bit scared but so determined.
Realising largely that the terror within them is the terror of the child and not that something awful will happen if I face it.
 
So yesterday I it all made me cry a lot. Started over something silly I'd  done then waves of crying Some of it nameless, most of it heart breaking. And because I'm tired and afraid and it's all  just so hard to make sense of any of  it.,,,Just the sheer complicated nonsensical craziness of all the spits in my head and the 100s of crazy dissociated fragments and all the sodding fears and difficulties in my present life that seem insurmountable because of the poison still held in all the child parts. I still fear there is no one for me and no one who isn't weird and crazy out there and no one who would love me in a good way and everyone seems disappointing, as does life. It's hard not to let it overwhelm me. Thank god for getting out into nature and my animals as they ground me,

So I hear you J, I'm taking care of myself, exercising when I can make myself and trying to rest. Telling myself it's the past and that one day it will be better.
Thank you x